March 2013
WHEN BARACK OBAMA WALKED ON STAGE TO SPEAK TO hundreds of Israeli university students, he received a rock-star welcome. It was Thursday, 20 March 2013 and Obama was clearly thrilled by the reception on his first presidential visit to Israel. Before a bank of American and Israeli flags, Obama gave a speech that delighted Israelis. He reaffirmed the bonds between the two countries. He said in his two days in Israel he had ‘borne witness to the history of the Jewish people’. And ‘I have seen Israel’s shining future in your scientists and entrepreneurs’.
But then President Obama said something that took Israelis by surprise – it was certainly something they had not heard before from a US president. He referred to the Israeli Army as ‘a foreign army’ when it came to the West Bank. The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must be recognised, he said. ‘Put yourself in their shoes; look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movement of not just those young people, but their parents and their grandparents every single day … Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.’1
Obama’s words would stun Israelis. The reference to the IDF as ‘a foreign army’ hit Israeli leaders like a thunderbolt.
In the US, due to the power of the pro-Israel lobby, Israel is regarded as a domestic issue. In the lead-up to his election in 2009, Obama had competed with Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the party’s nomination, as to who supported Israel more. Their two speeches to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference had shown the competition between them to win support from the Jewish.
But upon his election it became clear what Obama really thought: that Israel’s relentless growth in settlements was disastrous. Barack Obama was a shock to Israel’s system.
From the beginning of his presidency the Israeli media were gunning for Obama; they would frequently refer to him using his Arabic middle name, Hussein. The government seemed pleased to let this undermining occur, especially as Obama’s stocks at home deteriorated. The view in Israel was that Obama was a one-term president, allowing them to stall on peace talks until another president was elected.
But Obama got his healthcare package through Congress and for a while his political stocks went up. In the Israeli media the dogs were called off. In the headlines he became ‘Barack’ once again, rather than ‘Hussein’.
New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman is regarded as America’s most influential writer on Israel. He has long been supportive of Israel. But in a feisty interview on Israeli television he would declare ‘Shame on you, Israel’ for trying to portray Obama as ‘a Jew hater’.
Yet not even Obama could stop the settlements. Friedman went on to say that in the battle between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, ‘Bibi won’.2 Thanks to the successful campaign by the Israeli lobby to achieve soft media treatment for Israel, Obama and other senior members of his administration would find themselves engaging in the same kind of self-censoring as other US politicians before them.
When Secretary of State John Kerry walked into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington on 25 April 2014, he could not have anticipated the coming storm. At a closed meeting, he spoke about his frustration that he’d made no progress after three years of negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians. Unaware that someone was recording him, he nominated the growth of Israeli settlements as a key reason. ‘There is a fundamental confrontation and it is over settlements,’ he said. ‘Fourteen thousand new settlement units announced since we began negotiations.’ He warned of possible violence: ‘People grow so frustrated with their lot in life that they begin to take other choices and go to dark places they’ve been before, which forces confrontation.’ But then he added: ‘A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid State with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a State that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish State.’3
In Israel, the media often reported warnings that Israel might become an apartheid state. Israel’s most decorated soldier and former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had warned about apartheid. So had another former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert: ‘If the day comes when the two-State solution collapses and we have a South Africa-style struggle for equal voting rights then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’
But three Purple Hearts were not enough to save John Kerry. America’s powerful pro-Israel lobby unleashed an attack.
However, rather than argue his case, Kerry retreated. ‘I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid State or that it intends to become one,’ Kerry said. ‘If I could rewind the tape I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish State and two nations and two people living side by side in peace and security is through a two-State solution.’ But in a hint of defiance, Kerry added: ‘While Justice Minister Livni, former Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert have all invoked the spectre of apartheid to underscore the dangers of a unitary State, for the future it is a word best left out of the debate here at home.’4
‘Apartheid’ is the one word that the supporters of Greater Israel resent. The New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren told me: ‘I think that’s what John Kerry was basically saying: “I lost ground on convincing people by using a word that people put me into a box that I’m one of those people who thinks it’s apartheid and they think they can ignore me.”’
This was not the only time Kerry had retreated. Some months later, Israel stated that the reason it had initiated the 2014 Gaza War was to target Hamas tunnels. But Palestinian civilian casualties had quickly spiralled – with an assault by fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and ships on the 365 square kilometre enclave, Israel had wreaked devastation.
Before an interview on Fox News, Kerry was caught mocking Israel’s claim of a targeted operation: ‘It’s a hell of a pin-point operation!’ The host, Chris Wallace, decided to put these comments to Kerry on air. Kerry took a much softer position. ‘It’s very difficult in these situations,’ he said.5
President Obama’s one-time Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel – now Mayor of Chicago – has also self-censored. Emanuel is regarded as a straight talker. Yet in an interview with New Republic magazine in April 2014, he insisted on going off the record when asked about Israel. The only thing he would say on the record was that he was ‘optimistic’ about a peace deal; it is quite possible that when he went off the record he said the exact opposite.6
Even US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro – who is Jewish and regarded by Israelis as ‘a close friend’ – came under fire for describing reality. ‘Too much vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked … There seem to be two standards,’ he said in 2016, stating the fact that Israel’s settlers live under Israeli civilian law while Palestinians next door live under Israeli military law. Prime Minister Netanyahu called Shapiro’s comments ‘unacceptable and wrong’. He summoned Shapiro to discuss them.7
Thomas Friedman said the sensitivity of discussing Israel for public figures in the US had reached the point where an ambitious young diplomat would not publicly state official US policy: that Israeli settlements are an obstacle to peace. On Washington’s policy of condoning Israel’s construction of settlements, Friedman said, ‘That particular policy is a source for me of great distress.’8
What this sort of self-censorship by the Obama administration meant was that rarely did Americans hear the truth about Israel. The mild resistance of Washington during the Obama years – ‘the settlements are unhelpful’ – was not enough to stop the number of settlers from growing.
Yet the haste with which Israel escalated its settlement expansion upon the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017 was extraordinary. Trump had made a campaign promise that he would lead the most pro-Israel administration ‘of all time’. His election to the presidency was a godsend to Netanyahu and his government. Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser with oversight of the Middle East. Kushner’s family foundation, of which he is a director, has donated funds to various settlements in the West Bank. According to US tax records obtained by the New York Post, the family donated $US58,500 between 2011 and 2013. This included donations to Yitzhar, a settlement with a well-known history of violence. Settlers from there are regularly caught on camera attacking Palestinians and property in nearby villages, often as the Israeli Army stands by and watches. The Washington Post also reported that the man Trump chose to be the US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is on the record as having opposed a two-State solution, and has been the President of Beit El Institutions, which financially supports Beit El and other settlements.9
Trump made clear during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s first meeting with him as President in February 2017 that he would be dramatically changing US policy. Standing next to Netanyahu, Trump appeared to abandon Washington’s long commitment to a two-State solution. ‘I’m looking at two-State and one-State, and I like the one that both parties like,’ he said.10
The editorial board of the New York Times, traditionally a strong supporter of Israel, noted after the meeting: ‘There is no conceivable one-state solution that both parties will like. Smiling by Mr Trump’s side, Mr Netanyahu, who has steadily undermined the prospect of a Palestinian state, clearly believed his vision was the one the new American President had in mind. The two leaders seemed almost giddy in their first official meeting, which was intended to show how Mr Trump can be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama was, even though Mr Obama completed a new 10-year, $38 billion defence agreement with Israel.’11
Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia Tim Fischer believes you cannot understand Israel’s power in the United States without studying an event that occurred on 8 June 1967, the fourth day of the Six Day War. On that day Israeli jets attacked one of the US’s most important naval intelligence ships, the USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors.
The US decided not to attack the attackers but made a strategic retreat, having been mauled by the Israeli Air Force. To use the word of Tim Fischer, the US ship ‘limped’ back to Malta.
Files about the incident – specifically, whether the attack was deliberate – have been sealed. Whether the attack was intentional, or accidental as Israel claimed, one thing is not disputed: the US reaction was almost nonexistent.
In the ensuing years, several US officials questioned why the US had not protested at the attack. Senator James Abourezk said: ‘The shame of the USS Liberty incident is that our sailors were treated as though they were enemies, rather than the patriots and heroes that they were. There is no other incident … that shows the power of the Israeli lobby by being able to silence successive American governments. Allowing the lies told by the Israelis and their minions in the US is disheartening to all of us who are proud of our servicemen.’12
Many became convinced that the attack was deliberate. Former congressman Paul Findley would write in 1985: ‘The attack was no accident. The Liberty was assaulted in broad daylight by Israeli forces who knew the ship’s identity … the President of the US led a cover-up so thorough that years after he left office, the episode was still largely unknown to the public – and the men who suffered and died have gone largely unhonoured.’13
Former Senator Adlai Stevenson III said in a 1980 interview: ‘Those sailors who were wounded, who were eyewitnesses, have not been heard from by the American public … [Their story] leaves no doubt but that this was a premeditated, carefully-reconnoitered attack by Israeli aircraft against our ship.’14 The deputy head of the US Mission in Cairo at the time, David Nes, said: ‘I don’t think that there’s any doubt that it was deliberate … [It is] one of the great cover-ups of our military history.’15
Tim Fischer has made a study of the USS Liberty incident and believes it has shaped US–Israeli relations. He told me it must have been ‘one of the lowest points in US military history’ to have left one of its ships on its own. ‘It flies in the face of the general military code to go in and help which is why the US military establishment have hushed it up … The US military have air-brushed it out of history because they are acutely embarrassed by it. Had the attackers been Chinese or Russian it would have been war.’
Mr Fischer added: ‘Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty and the non-reaction by America meant from then on Israel could do anything with impunity … If President Johnson was not going to send fighter jets in to protect one of his ships they were not going to do anything else. What happened to the Liberty may have changed the face of the Middle East. Little young Israel could do anything and get away with it. It could start building the atomic bomb on a scale and they knew the US would do nothing – they had these friends in Washington and that was enough.’
George Ball, Under-Secretary of State at the time, would write in 1992: ‘If American leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.’16
History confirmed these words only too clearly. A letter from the US Ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, to the State Department, dated 25 July 1974, made it clear that the US was in on the plan to build settlements in the West Bank from the beginning. Keating wrote it the day after meeting Yigal Alon, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs. He wrote: ‘I raised US concern over Israeli press stories on plans to establish new settlements in occupied territories and adverse effect these stories could have upon [peace] negotiations. Alon responded sympathetically to my remarks and said that he would make additional efforts to keep stories on this subject out of the press.’
The US–Israeli strategy was clear: to try to keep stories about settlements out of the media rather than to stop them.
‘For the last 40 years, a succession of Israeli governments has misled, manipulated or persuaded naïve US presidents that since Israel was negotiating to give up significant territory, there was no need to fight over “insignificant” settlements on some territory’, wrote Thomas Friedman. ‘Behind the charade, Israeli settlers bit more and more of the West Bank, creating a huge moral, security and economic burden for Israel and its friends.’17
At first I assumed he was a real journalist. Indeed, the way he introduced himself was impressive. ‘I work in the White House Press Corps,’ he told me. It was 16 December 2009 and I was in the West Bank settlement of Ariel for a conference about how the rest of the world viewed Israel. We’d just sat down to lunch. The man’s name was William Koenig, and he introduced himself as the White House correspondent for Koenig International News.
But the conversation took an odd turn when he told me that many of America’s natural disasters had followed criticism. He listed various disasters and attributed them to US criticism or ‘weakness’ relating to Israel. Criticise Israel and God will be angry. I quickly realised that William Koenig was no ordinary reporter. I discovered that he was a leader of the Christian Zionist movement, which ensures Israel has enough support in the Congress to expand its occupation.
Koenig has written Eye to Eye, a book that shows the links between 57 ‘major catastrophes and events’ and the ‘anti-Israel’ comments that caused them. Koenig argued that a ‘very large majority’ of President George W Bush’s political problems and the many natural catastrophes during his time in office ‘have a direct connection to his involvement with the Israeli–Palestinian peace process’. Koenig wrote: ‘Many world leaders believe that Israel is the key to peace when in reality the continued pressure upon Israel and the subsequent events will rapidly lead the world into the final battle: the battle of Armageddon – the battle for Jerusalem. We hope and pray this book helps you become better aware of why the world is rapidly moving into her final days and nearing the return of the Messiah to Jerusalem.’18
Koenig argued that ‘eleven of the twelve costliest hurricanes in US history have a direct tie-in to US-Israeli peace efforts’. Hurricane Katrina, for example, which at US$80 billion was the most expensive disaster in US history, was retribution for the fact that President George W Bush expressed pleasure at Israel’s withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza; Hurricane Andrew came during the Madrid peace talks; Hurricane Charley came as the George W Bush Administration pressured Israel to withdraw from unauthorised outposts; Hurricane Wilma came as the US froze Israel’s financial aid in response to settlement construction and Bush hosted Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House; Hurricane Ivan came as the ‘Bush administration continued pressure on Israel’; Hurricane Rita was retribution for Bush’s hosting of Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House.
William Koenig even linked the September 11, 2001 attacks to US policy on Israel. He writes:
In August and September of 2001, President Bush worked with Prince Bandar – the Saudi Ambassador to the US – Secretary of State Colin Powell and Daniel Kurtzer, the US Ambassador to Israel, to develop a comprehensive peace plan that Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] would approve. Powell was to deliver the Bush plan to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2001. The plan divided Israel and created a Palestinian state, in return for ‘peace and security’ guarantees to Israel. The plan’s completion and presentation were disrupted by the September 11, 2001, terror events. For a brief moment, the God of Israel lifted His protection as evil people attacked America.
Politically, what is important for Israel is that the US continues to support its settlement expansion – or, at least, never does anything more than issue statements that new settlements are ‘unhelpful’. For this reason, people like William Koenig are crucial.
He explained to me how he tried to ensure that Israel was not criticised. ‘We have eyes everywhere,’ he said. ‘We have eyes in the US, in Europe, in Australia. With the internet it is all so much easier. The moment one of our people sees something negative about Israel we jump. Someone hits back quickly.’
Aspiring members of Congress who challenge the Christian Zionist movement do so at their own peril. Christian Zionists argue against a Palestinian State. ‘We think Israel should have all the land out here,’ Koenig told me. The view that anyone who criticises Israel risks apocalyptic revenge has entered US mainstream politics. Even one-time Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann echoed this outlook. Responding to pictures of floods in South Carolina, she tweeted: ‘US turns back on Israel, disasters follow.’
Though the US has turned a blind eye to the settlements from the beginning of Israel’s occupation, occasionally an administration has expressed some resistance. Jimmy Carter was the only president to brand the settlements ‘illegal’, and from that moment the pro-Israel lobby in the US ran a campaign against him. When Carter announced, at 90, that he had cancer that had spread to his brain, this was seen by some as punishment for his views on Israel. As a Jewish website reported: ‘For some Jews (and evangelical Christians), the cause apparently is obvious. No, it’s not his genetic make-up, or the spread of a mass from his liver to his brain. It’s divine punishment for his behavior toward the Jews.’19 George Bush Senior threatened to stop the US from guaranteeing loans to Israel if it did not curtail settlements, and likewise the pro-Israel lobby ran a campaign against him. After George W Bush threatened loan guarantees to Israel if they continued settlements, the Republican Party received a backlash from pro-Israel supporters in the US, including the Christian Zionists.
Koenig described himself as ‘an evangelical’ and was scathing of some church groups which, he said, had made matters worse by supporting the peace process. ‘It’s all in the Bible. This land belongs to Israel. If Christian groups like the World Council of Churches and the Vatican had supported Israel for the last 40 years the whole situation wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in.’
In Eye to Eye Koenig explains Israel has a right to the West Bank ‘because God said so’. Supporting this, he quotes from the Bible, Genesis 13:14–17: ‘The Lord said to Abram, “Lift up now your eyes, and look from the place where you are northward, and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever.”’ Koenig argues that ‘God specifically declared “No Peace Deals”, citing Exodus 32: ‘“Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against Me.”’
I asked Koenig what should happen to the Palestinians. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They just will become part of a larger Israel.’
A key link in the Christian Zionist chain is the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem – the contact point in Israel for Christian Zionists. The day I met David Parsons, the head of the embassy, in October 2014, he had just come from a meeting with the Israeli Government.
Parsons once worked as a lobbyist in Washington. ‘We have a strong branch in the US but our strongest branch is in Europe,’ he said. ‘We have branch offices established in 80 countries, including in some Muslim majority countries that we really can’t name to protect them, but Christians there who support Israel. Our magazine goes to 140 countries, our email list to 150, our TV show is in probably 190 countries.’
Parsons said his followers had ‘a predisposition’ to support Israel. ‘We’re not anti-Arab, it’s just that we see the animosity towards Israel, and we say, “Hey Christians, especially in Europe where there’s so much history of Christian anti-Semitism, our churches made these mistakes for centuries, and we see the rest of the world buying into the lies now against the Jews in the form of the Jewish State, and it was a mistake to do it and it’s a mistake for you to do it.”’
So what is the goal of Christian Zionists, according to David Parsons? ‘There’s an effort to try to give fairness to the whole debate over Israel because of the way the Jews were so unfairly treated in the Christian world for centuries. It’s a basic faith principle that the way we read the Bible it says God loves the whole world but to reach the whole world with his redemptive plan he chose a certain vessel to do this through and that was the Jewish people.’
As a leader of the movement, did Parsons think there should be a Palestinian State? ‘I still believe that the Jewish claim to the entire land is superior historically and that the claim of Palestinian national identity is of more modern origin,’ he told me.
He said the support of Christians in the US reflected the community as a whole. ‘When you look at the polls in America concerning Israel it’s always been high 60s into the high 70s of support for Israel, generally. The evangelical community tracks just a little ahead of that, we’re the strongest but still not that far off from the general view in the US because a lot of it is based on shared values, shared democratic Judaeo-Christian values and traditions and such and they see Israel as a solid ally … There’s always been this Arabist bloc in the State Department that has tried to present the Arab point of view and the White House is always in between those two. This is Washington. The different White Houses over time and how they play that off and navigate that has always been interesting.’
Parsons rejected the notion that there was not a genuine discussion in Congress about Israel. ‘I think they voice the concerns of the people and they’re concerned about the Iranian threat, not just the threat to Israel but others in the region … [pro-Israel lobby] AIPAC is viewed as powerful but it’s just effective.’ AIPAC, he said, ‘knows how to speak to Americans and elected American officials.’
Jodi Rudoren from the New York Times has closely observed Israel and its influence in the US, particularly through its most powerful lobby group, AIPAC. She told me: ‘AIPAC and the related groups long ago built a system in which they operate in every congressional district, they raise enough money and mobilise enough small donors to influence every single congressional district.’
I asked Rudoren whether this was unhealthy for US democracy: ‘I don’t think there’s a very healthy debate in America over Israeli policy. There’s very much this notion that you’re with us or against us – betrayal, all that stuff.’
I asked Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar: does AIPAC distort the discussion of Israel? ‘I think they are an obstacle to the two-State solution which is the very idea of Zionism,’ he replied. ‘Without the two-State solution Zionism is kaput. As to why AIPAC is opposed to a two-State solution, the cynical answer would be that if there is peace and no embargoes on Israel there will be no need for those people and there are hundreds of people who make a living from the current situation. It’s similar to the weapons industry and the military lobby – if there is peace who needs to have such a big army in Israel, and so many arms dealers?’
I asked Eldar if American politicians were scared of Israel. He said:
They’re scared of AIPAC. And they’re scared for a very good reason. AIPAC has many dead heads on their belt – skeletons – of congressmen who dared not to vote against Israel but who didn’t have a completely positive record on votes when it was about Israel or Iran.
I wrote a book called The Jerusalem Capital Ambush on how AIPAC was manipulating the Congress to pass a bill to move the [US] embassy to Jerusalem, embarrassing both Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin. And how did they do this? By playing Republicans and Democrats. There was a story in the New York Times about how they got rid of an incumbent congresswoman from a district that hardly saw a Jew there by pouring money into the political action committee. It was an African American against an African American and they decided to get rid of the incumbent because she didn’t have a clean record on Israel. AIPAC is considered to be one of the leading lobbies after the unions and gun lobby.
Eldar and other Israeli analysts believe that even though competition to AIPAC has emerged in recent years through groups more prepared to accommodate a two-State solution, such as J-Street, AIPAC still remains the Israel-related lobby group that US lawmakers fear.
It is impossible to examine the US factor in Israel without looking at the role of Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino billionaire who is one of America’s wealthiest men. Adelson supports a Greater Israel under which settlers take the West Bank and leave no possibility for a Palestinian State. An address he gave to the Israeli–American Council on 9 November 2014 offered an idea of his views: ‘I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy … God talked about all sorts of good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining a democratic state, and if Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state – so what?’
Adelson is a major backer of Benjamin Netanyahu through his free newspaper Israel Today, the most-read newspaper in Israel. Ehud Olmert told me over dinner in August 2012 that he believed Adelson had founded the paper in response to Olmert’s peace offer to the Palestinians.
The billionaire funds the Birthright – or Taglit – program under which hundreds of thousands of young diaspora Jews visit Israel, and gives financial backing to both American and Israeli politicians whose view of Israel fits with his. Adelson is famous for anointing with a huge financial donation the most ‘pro-Israel’ candidate in each presidential election.
Jodi Rudoren said Adelson was largely perceived in both the US and Israel as ‘a bit of a clown, an old rich guy who doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him’. She added: ‘He’s got more money than God and he’s willing to spend it. It didn’t work: he spent $100 million on Mitt Romney and he lost. But anyone who’s going to spend $100 million on anything everyone is going to take seriously.’
Adelson is by no means the only wealthy American funding Israel’s settlement push. In 2015 Haaretz newspaper found that between 2009 and 2013, private US donors used a network of tax-exempt non-profit organisations to funnel more than US$220 million to Israeli communities in the West Bank. ‘The funding is being used for anything from buying air conditioners to supporting the families of convicted Jewish terrorists, and comes from tax-deductible donations made to around 50 US-based groups’, the paper said. ‘Thanks to their status as non-profits, these organisations are not taxed on their income and donations made to them are tax deductible – meaning the US Government is incentivizing and indirectly supporting the Israeli settlement movement, even though it has been consistently opposed by every US administration for the past 48 years.’20
One important American donor has been millionaire doctor Irving Moskowitz, who made his fortune in the US by buying and selling hospitals. Dr Moskowitz died in 2016 at the age of 88. According to his foundation’s website, in 1988 the City of Hawaiian Gardens in California licensed his foundation to operate The Bingo Club as a charitable, non-profit organisation. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal did a major investigation of the club. He found: ‘Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the Old City, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.’ McGreal quoted local rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, who said, ‘Moskowitz is taking millions from the poorest towns in California and sending it to the settlements.’21
The US remains one of the few countries unconditionally supporting Israel. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told me that the notion that the US is an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians as ‘grotesque’. ‘If the US decided now to stop supplying the Israeli Air Force with one screw [the occupation] is finished. No Israeli prime minister could say a word after that. The dependence is total … Any country the size of Israel cannot live without trade. The Jewish community in the US is the key to everything … I think the Jewish lobby is more powerful in America than the Christian Zionists, but those, together with the arms industry, are crucial.’
The US could force an end to the occupation ‘within days,’ said Levy. ‘Israel doesn’t exist without the US … It’s only by really putting a very clear choice to Israel that you will get a result – either you get US aid, or you continue the occupation. The US also stops Europe from boycotting Israel.’
Danish journalist Uffe Taudal found it ‘very odd’ that the US Congress was prepared to applaud Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly advocated policies contrary to Washington’s. ‘Netanyahu went to the US Congress and said Jerusalem will always stay united,’ he told me. ‘Everybody stood up and clapped – it has been official American policy for at least 40 years that the US wants Jerusalem as a capital for the Palestinians and a capital for Israel – except for four people they stood up and clapped against stated American bipartisan policy for Republican and Democratic presidents … At the heart of this [Israeli] strategy is very clever lobbying and very clever political diplomacy. The Israelis make sure that in Europe and the US whatever you say about this conflict you risk paying a huge political price.’
I put to Jody Rudoren that many of Israel’s laws governing Palestinians would be illegal under the US Constitution – for example, limiting the number of Palestinians who can assemble to 10, or taking children from the age of 12 for nighttime interrogations. She agreed, adding that one could look at examples in Israel itself, rather than the West Bank: ‘There are communities here where there are racial criteria for entry to live, all sorts of things that nobody in America would ever accept. But … Americans by and large accept that Israel is a different type of place. They don’t apply their standards. They buy this idea of Israel as a Jewish State created out of the worst moment of history and that it may be an anomalous ethnocracy … they simply buy this Jewish–Israeli notion of a Jewish and democratic State.’
Jodi Rudoren believes the future of Israel was likely to be decided in a political battle between Europe and the US. ‘There are a lot of really simple things that Europe could do and whether they are prepared to do them instead of just saying them over again is an interesting question.’
In the US, as in Australia, unconditional support for Israel is beginning to be challenged. A program has been started in Israel to offer a broader view than traditionally sponsored trips have taken. A group called Extend has been started, taking advantage of the fact that thousands of young American Jews come to Israel on Sheldon Adelson’s Birthright trips. Participants are offered a different perspective if they are able to ‘extend’ their trips. One organisation that offers a briefing to these youths is Military Court Watch, started by Australian lawyer Gerard Horton to monitor the treatment of Palestinian youths before Israel’s military court. Referring to Extend, Horton told me: ‘These participants get a briefing from Military Court Watch and they sometimes go back to their hotel rooms and are shell-shocked because they realise everything they have been taught is under question.’
However, while Europe is becoming impatient with Israel, it appears that, if anything, US policy under Donald Trump will only further entrench the occupation.
For 50 years, since Israel began the settlement enterprise on which it has based its occupation, the US has supported Israeli policy. With occasional exceptions, Washington has stood by as Israeli politicians have methodically steered their country towards the abyss of apartheid.